Giving Credit Where It Isn’t Due

I agree wholeheartedly with Rod that Rush Limbaugh’s analysis is not worth anything, since it includes such gems as this (via Reeve):

Why, putting it somewhat coarsely, why doesn’t the Republican Party get credit for Condoleezza Rice?

Once you stop laughing, consider what Limbaugh is saying. The GOP should apparently receive “credit” for elevating Rice to important positions in the Bush administration, which had one of the worst foreign policy records in the postwar era. It so happens that she performed poorly in both positions, and her performance contributed to some of the major failures of the Bush administration. Yet Limbaugh demands to know why the GOP doesn’t “get credit” for including her as an administration official. Who should give them credit? Why does the GOP deserve any credit? The fact that Limbaugh thinks that the GOP deserves “credit” for Rice goes a long way towards explaining why the GOP doesn’t get any.

Try turning this around and consider how it would sound to a Republican or conservative audience. Imagine some outraged MSNBC host demanding to know why the Democratic Party doesn’t “get credit” for Bart Stupak or Tom Donnelly on pro-life grounds, and you’ll appreciate just how ridiculous this complaint is. Pro-life conservatives aren’t going to give the Democratic Party “credit” for the fact that some Democratic politicians profess to be pro-life while belonging to a party that isn’t. At best, most pro-life conservatives view their membership in the Democratic Party as a serious mistake and at worst as a scam designed to lure pro-life voters into supporting the wrong party.

Along the same lines, it’s not as if Republicans ever gave Democrats “credit” for supporting Jim Webb’s election to the Senate. They didn’t see Webb’s nomination on the Democratic Party line as a reason to give Democrats “credit,” but instead considered it a reason to dislike Webb. As most Republicans see it, someone with Webb’s background isn’t supposed to be a Democrat nowadays, so the party didn’t get any “credit” for nominating him. It is difficult to imagine someone in Limbaugh’s position complaining that the Republican Party isn’t given enough “credit” for its antiwar dissenters that aren’t in a position to define the party’s positions on foreign policy. Someone like Limbaugh wouldn’t want the GOP to receive “credit” for this, since he presumably wishes these people weren’t part of the GOP.

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19 Responses to Giving Credit Where It Isn’t Due

If the Republicans want to claim “credit” for Condi Rice, I sure won’t stop them.

Snark aside, the sad thing is that it is not outside the realm of possibility for her to be the GOP vice presidential nominee in 2016. It’s all too easy to envision the party establishment deluding itself into believing she’s the answer to the party’s problems among non-white voters (especially if Marco Rubio doesn’t want the job).

Look, the GOP has to decide whether they want people like Limbaugh and a whole bunch of others–most of the Fox News crew, and a sizable portion of the NRO crew–defining what it means to be conservative. I am now in my 60s, and deeply Democratic, but I grew up in an old fashioned Republican family. My father–born in 1904–had never voted for a Democrat. Shortly before his death in 1977 he resigned from the Republican party, which for a person of his generation was a major gesture–party affiliation was real to them. His reason was that he had received a fund raising letter from, as he put it “these guys Reagan and Helms, they are not conservatives, they are reactionaries, and I will have nothing to do with them.” That, to me, now nearly 40 years later, is the definition of the problem with the Republican party. They have not been conservative for nearly half a century. And with every election cycle, they seem to become more reactionary. I would be very pleased with a genuinely conservative party in this country, much as is defined by this web site, regardless of whether I voted Republican. But I do not see it happening any time soon.

Limbaugh’s was a clumsy way to put it, and an even worse example. But your analogies are not precise — black, white, hispanic, Asian are demographic categories, pretty much mutually exclusive. Prolife is an ideology. One can be both black and prolife, Asian and prochoice.

Now, the charge against the Republicans is that they are too white and even racist. They rather pathetically put forward the Rice’s and Powells and Allan West’s and Alberto Gonzalez’s of the Party in order to say — hey, you don’t see the Klan giving ‘people of color’ positions of power. It should be a valid defense, as they have gone far beyond mere tokenism. But it pays ‘progressives’ to try to keep blacks in solidarity mode, and the best way to do that is whip up an enemy, those evil whitey Republicans.

You ironically completely missed Limbaugh’s point. He was mocking Republicans who think they should get credit. He in fact was agreeing with you. He was saying that folks in the GOP who think we are going to win blacks and Hispanics by merely pointing to the fact that we have blacks and Hispanics in the party are delusional.

Read a little further where he says, “…There’s one option that still hasn’t been tried in a long time. It’s called conservatism with a capital C.”

I also took it that Rash was using a mocking tone here, but given his own personal delusions he probably can’t see the obvious short comings of Rice, although working with a sociopath like Chaney must have put quite a handicap in her ability to excel. The same goes for Powell, who clearly lied through his teeth for the neocon controllers to get Iraq on the war gameboard.
And what happened to the Republican Party taking credit for GW? Didn’t see much of him in Tampa, did you?

Going forward, are the Republicans going to have to re-invent themselves for every election and disavow all previous leadership?

@ pat re Jim Webb. I supported him six years ago, but have only sporadically followed him since. In the showhorse vs workhorse categories of Senator-types, he’s been the latter. It’s not that he shies away from the cameras or microphones when he’s got something to say, he just isn’t competing with his colleagues for media attention.

I think Webb pretty early decided he was unlikely to want to run for re-election, so if he wanted to not waste six years of his life, he’d have to pick a handful of areas and focus. And he does seem to have been a hard worker in selected areas.

Most important has been the spotlight he’s brought to chronicling our dysfunctional criminal justice and prisons system and proposing areas for change. He’s received high marks all round for his careful, considered efforts. But of course the GOP filibustered his proposed National Reform Commission last year, even though he had bipartisan sponsors. And between this being an election year and his getting ready to leave, someone else is going to have to pick up what he’s done and move it forward.

The other area that he’s paid a great deal of attention to, not surprising given his personal history, has been as Chair of the For Rel’s Comm’s East Asia/Pacific sub-committee. Managing the Burma sanctions transition seems to have been especially important for him, and Kerry apparently had no problem with Webb taking a fairly high-profile. I hope he gets to accompany Obama on the just-announced Burma trip. That would be an extremely gratifying way to wind up his six years in DC.

black, white, hispanic, Asian are demographic categories, pretty much mutually exclusive
Tell that to a Dominican. Tell that to Tiger Woods. Tell that to Alberto Fujimori. Tell that to President Obama.

This just reeks of unknowing, inaccurate essentialism. This is pretty much the defintion of racism of the non-evil variety: trying to view huge swaths of people not for the diverse richness of who they are, but reducing them to single common markers that are “pretty much exclusive” to one another.

As a few starting points: 1) Many American Blacks have plenty of European DNA, often for horrifying reasons (many plausibly claim descent from Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, for example). 2) Hispanics have a cultural lens that can be applied to any race you want. Likewise for the religions of Judaism and Islam. 3) Asians come in many varieties, and every variety is capable of embracing Latin culture and interbreeding with people of other ethnicities.

This is the problem the Republican Party has inflicted upon itself with almost every minority group (“model” minorities like Jews and Asians definitely included): 50+ years of willfully not bothering to care or even learn about the basic facts and interests of these people’s lives. If such a group doesn’t happen to coincidently line up exactly on a Republican Party position (like Cuban and Vietnamese and Persian expats), the Party has absolutely no interest in anything that group cares about, and no policies to offer to serve that constituency.

This is far more than a crude matter of “giving them free stuff” (which the Republican Party would much rather dole out to land speculators, extractive megacorps, and the military-industrial complex), but a matter of actually bothering to know voters well enough to even try to tweak legal policies in a way that will constructively serve them. So long as the Republican Party is more concerned with retaining complete purity to abstract and reactionary ideologies than it is to learning about the actual interests of voting blocs it would like to woo, it will continue to deservedly attract less than 1/3 of the votes of the blocs in question.

“Tell that to a Dominican. Tell that to Tiger Woods. Tell that to Alberto Fujimori. Tell that to President Obama.”

I said ‘pretty much’.

And your examples are not making your case, except for Tiger. Fujimori may be ‘hispanic’, but fled back to his ancestral Japan when the fit hit the shan — where he was welcomed precisely because he is biologically/ethnically Japanese. Obama famously checked the ‘black’ box on his Census form, even though he is biologically half white and was raised mostly by whites. I can’t comment on your anonymous Dominican, but Tiger is the only guy that has embraced his multiraciality.

“50+ years of willfully not bothering to care or even learn about the basic facts and interests of these people’s lives.”

Wait, I thought we were all supposed to be pretty much the same — trying to make ends meet, pay the mortgage, etc. Now you are telling me some groups are special, and need a little more attention from Mom and Pop.

BTW, California had an Asian American (Japanese by way of Canada) Senator back in the 1970s — SI Hayakawa, Republican.

I was so tempted to want to listen to El Rushbo had say about the election (I had done so after previous GOP losses) but then I realized that was exactly what Rush wanted, he wanted the all the attention. He wants to bee seen an an arbiter of the GOP future and thus wants you to listen to him because he has something inetersting to say. I passed (Although I did see the transcript).

There’s a point he made I would like to address directly and that the notion the media ignores the party’s minority candidate and public officials, determined to keep them down. Maybe they do, I don’t know, but if so I know the answer why: because these “successful minorities” largely come from white states and or districts. They’re the kind of candidates only a white GOPer would like because they represent white areas or white states.. They don’t represent black areas and they don’t represent any Hispanics either (outside of Cruz and Rubio) and until that happens, a black electorate in say, the South Side of Chicago votes for such a Republican-Conservative, they will never be taken seriously

“You ironically completely missed Limbaugh’s point. He was mocking Republicans who think they should get credit.”

Actually, you’re missing Rush’s real point. His real argument is that conservatism is perfect and if minorities don’t understand that, it’s because they’re too stupid to know what’s good for them. He saying “We’ve tried putting a token black/brown face on conservatism and they still won’t buy it, so screw ’em”.

“They rather pathetically put forward the Rice’s and Powells and Allan West’s and Alberto Gonzalez’s of the Party in order to say — hey, you don’t see the Klan giving ‘people of color’ positions of power.”

The problem is that the only person on that list who got where they did in life through sheer merit was Colin Powell. Rice, West and Gonzalez were all clearly products of Republican affirmative action.

Actually, you can be black and hispanic, white and hispanic, and even asian and hispanic. That’s the whole problem with trying to get this mythical “hispanic” vote – there really isn’t one, it’s a conglomeration of many different constituencies.

Daniel, I think that you are overthinking this. The Democrats love to congratulate themselves on their “firsts” and their commitment to diversity. John Kennedy this, Geraldine Ferraro that, Barack Obama the other thing. Now we are going to hear a lot more about nobody ceremonial mayor of San Antonio Julian Castro and new Senator Tammy Baldwin — not because of their distinctive talents or accomplishments (such as they are), but because of, well, you know. It can be maddening to partisan Republicans, and (though I am not one of them) I can’t blame them. All the JC Watts’ and Mia Loves and Marco Rubios and Sarah Palins (to say nothing of figures from yesteryear such as Sandra Day O’Connor, Nancy Kassebaum, Edward Brooke, et al) in the world can’t earn the RepubliKKKan Hitlerites any respect from their liberal enemies.

@Noah172 — uh, JFK, Ferraro, Obama, and now Baldwin, each in their time, came from and represented symbolically very significant parts of the Democratic coalition that had been excluded from the notion of what was “acceptable” in a national-level politician. If they stood on the podium of a party convention, they were there as individuals because within their party they’d competed and won influence, but they also represented important parts of the party’s base which was now being acknowledged by their party.

Surely you can see the difference. Their success made it more feasible for Democrats from those previously excluded categories to compete within the party for important candidacies and to be taken more seriously by the political world. Though it’s taken decades of expanding the Dem recruitment pool, white men will finally be a minority in the House Dem Caucus this year — still over-represented compared to the voting citizenry, but in a more representative group. JC Watts and Condolezza Rice may be personal stars, but they haven’t opened any noticeable doors for black Republicans within the party.

As for the fine women GOP Senators of yesteryear who were indeed admired by their liberal sisters and even served as role models, there are unfortunately fewer of them. They’re also being increasingly marginalized as RINOs and ignored in favor of cosmic jokes like Sarah Palin. At least on the face of it, seems the GOP’s been heading in the wrong direction, so it’s hard to see why the GOP should be getting much “credit”.